V. I. Lenin

Note to the Theses “Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”

Written:Written in January–February 1916Published:First published in 1937 inLenin Miscellany XXX.

      Printed from the original.

      Translated from the German.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1977,

      Moscow,Volume 41,

      page366.2.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
      © 2004

      Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
      terms of theGNU Free Documentation License.

Thereis some similarity between the way mankind should arrive at the abolition
of classes and the way it should subsequently arrive at the fusion of
nations. Thus, only a transition stage of dictatorship by the oppressed class
leads to the abolition of classes, only the liberation of the oppressed nations
and real eradication of national oppression leads to the fusion of nations, and
the political criterion of the feasibility of this lies precisely in the
freedom to secede. Freedom to secede is the best and the onlypoliticalmeans against the idiotic system of petty states and
national
isolation which, to mankind’s good fortune, is being inexorably destroyed
by the whole course of capitalist development.